Data Security

If you accept credit and debit cards, your business is responsible for ensuring that its data security efforts reflect current best practices. This is necessary for your own risk management as well as for the protection of your customers. Here are three methods to improve your data security: 1. Confirm your payment processors are secure.…

Wal-Mart is suing Visa for allowing customers to verify chip-enabled debit card transactions with a signature instead of a PIN. The lawsuit filed Tuesday in New York Supreme Court says that Visa requires Wal-Mart to accept signature-based transactions for chip debit cards, which Wal-Mart says are a less secure method of payment than PIN-based payments and…

Many merchants and retail workers are watching their lives play in slow motion when they process credit cards. To combat fraudulent transactions, the retail industry is shifting away from the traditional magnetic stripe toward tiny computer chips embedded inside cards. The chip technology, known as E.M.V. (for Europay, MasterCard and Visa), has been around for…

Security breaches in the retail sector are becoming more common due to the large payoff to criminals in seizing credit card information. While hardly a month goes by without a media report announcing a retail breach, their average size has changed over the past few years. While 2014 was named the Year of the Retailer…

If you're tired of how much longer checkout at a store is taking since the rollout of new chip-enabled credit and debit cards, relief may be on the way. Visa said on Tuesday it had upgraded its software to improve the processing of chip-enabled cards and reduce checkout times. The payments company said the upgrade will…

The payments industry is evolving rapidly, between the switch to Europay, MasterCard, and Visa (EMV) in the United States this past year along with the successes and failures associated with mobile payments. With new innovations and technologies also comes a shift in consumer behavior and expectations.

Marketers are aspirational people and "DMP" is the latest buzzword threatening single customer view’s long-standing reputation as the Holy Grail of marketing. Essentially, a data management platform (DMP) is a tool that stores data from multiple sources, helping marketers identify previously anonymous customer segments so they can target them via the appropriate channel with appropriate…

Personal information included on tax forms of Sprouts’ employees was compromised in a phishing scam. Last week, a payroll department employee at the company's headquarters in Arizona responded to an email thought to be from a company senior executive. In the email, the person asked for the 2015 W-2 statements of all Sprouts workers. The employee complied…

Avi Kaner, a co-owner of the Morton Williams supermarket chain in New York, has spent about $700,000 to update the payment terminals at his stores. Trouble is, he cannot turn them on. The new terminals can accept credit and debit cards with embedded digital chips, a security feature intended to reduce the number of fraudulent purchases. But before…

Amazon.com went down for some users on Thursday afternoon for approximately 20 minutes before being restored. Users trying to access the Amazon website as well as the mobile app at around 2:20 p.m. ET were greeted with error messages. During the outage, many users took to Twitter to vent their frustration.